Beginnings of endings

During the last few months, I've started numerous blog entries, some detailed, descriptive and ambitious, some dreamy and ad hoc and others philosophical and boldy hoping to be thought-provoking... none of them made it to publication. Not as a result of strict self-censorship, but rather as a result of habitual self-destruction.
Now that doesn't mean I've become suicidal - not in the strict sense of the word, at least - but probably since May 2009 I've lived a lifestyle so packed and full to the brim that I allowed myself no time for such essential things as reading and writing... let alone meditation, playing the cello or doing regular exercise. Packed at first - from May till mid-August with work and theatre, then theatre was replaced by a number of projects, especially one: organising Jordan's first environmental film festival ("Seeing Green - عين على البيئة").
On the 1st of October I quit being the only German working in HM the Queen of Britain's representation in Jordan and since the day after that my life has been completely taken over by my new job as the manager of an ambitious private-sector recycling program here in Amman - as everything BUT a 9-5 job it leads to me sometimes getting up at 5am to prepare a report, sitting till midnight writing "follow-up" emails or giving workshops on weekends. Our company is the only one in Jordan offering recycling services and as the green wave slowly hits Jordan, too, we're experiencing crazy demand and exponential growth - we've gone from processing 2-5 tons of recycling materials a week to over 10 tons since I joined 3 months ago and are expecting to hit over 30tons within three months from now. Last week I employed 10 new workers and this coming week our small management team of three will be joined by a new, creative spirit, who is badly needed to help guide the growth in the right direction, especially in the goal of becoming Jordan's first commercial compost producer.

And during all of that I always hoped to take a weekend off to write... to get back to all those beginnings of entries and find some endings for them...
But recently I've decided to just be realistic - it's not going to happen! So in a moment of self-indulgence I decided to put these beginnings up here anyway, while not giving up the hope that they might one day find completion. They might not all make sense - but since when has that been the point of writing?

So I'll start almost a year back, in March, when I went to visit my brother in the US of A...


Yellow (March 2009, Atlanta)

is the colour of my room. Bright yellow.
The sun has not yet broken through the morning clouds – still veiled, it stretches out on the yellow carpet floor in the alcove under the open window. The early birdsong sounds subdued, though I can’t tell whether it’s due to the hidden sun or just the oddly persistent pressure on my ears that hasn’t vanished since I flew in three days ago – as if my ears just hadn’t adapted properly during landing.
I’ve come to the US to visit a man of distinction and sophistication and a socialite par excellence: my brother. In the three days I’ve been here, we’ve had four social engagements, including a Saturday brunch and several exquisitely cooked dinners accompanied by wines beyond my imagination… a waste on my ignorant tongue!
As this man I’ve come to visit also works hard during the day and goes to study on weekends, it leaves little time to actually see him in person and although I live in his house, in the 72 hours I’ve been here, I haven’t really had a chance to talk to him one-to-one. Right now – Sunday morning – while I retreated back to my room with a big pot of honey-sweetened Fennel tea, he is having breakfast with one of his work colleagues downstairs.
Not that that is necessarily a regrettable fact – on the contrary, it has been very interesting to hear his news, gauge his development since I last saw him and guess his current feelings or worries by listening to dinner table conversations he leads with others, and by observing him in social interaction, rather than from thought-through responses to direct questions. He’s doing well, it seems – he is both very successful in his career-building and incredibly popular, loved even, by the people he deals with, who appreciate his abilities and his unusually frank character.

Well, last night again, we sat at the dinner table with a couple he had invited, over parsnip soup, followed by broiled sea bass on a bed of black rice and spinach and a dessert so extravagant I can’t even describe it. And as is the case with most Americans, they’re very good at starting conversations with strangers, which was a marked advantage for me, as I had never met them of course. And so it happened that fairly soon we got onto a topic no other than sustainability and the future of ‘our planet’. During a very dynamic and thorough discussion, I had the chance to review andr revise some of my previous opinions and beliefs on the subject matter (which I partly expressed here before), noticing most importantly, that although I work in this field and am determined to make it more than just my profession - yes, maybe my mission even - I spend shockingly little time researching, discussing, questioning and debating it.

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A fire on the left. (May 2009, Jordan)

(alone, in the servees from Amman to Damascus, straight after first proper rehearsal for the play "Jasad's story"; while the sun was burning the desert in the west)

Not in the mood for depth and exaggerated, dramatic contemplation. I want to write about the rehearsal, about the cast, the play and the process.
We are all so different. Surprise, surprise!! But all of us seem to be at a stage in their life, where they have reached something that satisfies them, that gives them energy, happiness. Even Muna – I mean, she’s tough to read, doesn’t say anything about herself and everything else she says is short, to the point and mostly practical. No anecdotes, stories, memories shared with the group. But that’s ok, I guess. We’ll get to know each other sooner or later, we’re going to spend incredibly intensive moments with each other, all of us – we’ll know each other’s physique inside out, no inhibitions, secrets, no awkwardness. Well, maybe a little awkwardness always remains; till we drop the self, but that’s another story.
So there are four of us, for now at least. Four actors, that is and our director – a man whose character and body both exude incredible strength and power. But real, deep power from self-control and –mastery, not pretence or machismo. His eyes are on fire, his body slim and agile, his hair long and clean.

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THE SYSTEM (September 2009, France)
(This piece is from mid-September when I met a very special person – here called M – in Grenoble for a few hours)

The first thing she did after I embraced her and sat down on the grass beside her, was to take my water bottle & rip off the label.
“Free your water!!” she exclaimed.
I knew I’d come to see the right person.
Later she told me that she wanted to earn some money for a few weeks now in order to buy a yurt and a little oven, so that she would be able to spend the winter in the forest. As normal as that might have sounded in another place and/or a different time, it was a rather unusual thing to hear in France, on a patch of grass next to a TGV station in the early 21st century – pleasantly unusual, let’s say. In fact, more than that – it was exactly what I wanted and needed to hear – there are people who manage to live outside the system.
In that sense, meeting M was a little like having an appointment with someone who lives outside the Matrix, but enters occasionally to help those inside to see – after speaking to her for a while you realise how trapped you are and how much you long for the freedom in which she lives, while at the same time how afraid you are to free yourself.


Let’s pause here for a definition: “the system”
Not easy to define, but maybe we could say: “The complete philosophical and physical infrastructure that lies at the basis of the Western way of life.”
That would be a very tame and PC definition. A less neutral version would be: “

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Update (October 2009, Amman)

It’s been so long.
And if I were to write about all the news, the amazing (co)incidences, the beautiful moments, the natural occurrences etc… an old German expression says: it wouldn’t fit on a cow’s hide.
As a long Jordanian summer definitely draws to a close, we are blessed with the first rains of the year and with Susie – the cat that prowls around the house – being pregnant again.
My contract at the Embassy ended last Thursday and on Saturday I started a new job. From the formal and clean environment of the diplomatic service with thick walls, high security and carpeted floor corridors, I now work in a gritty, industrial area, next to Jordan's largest refugee camp, where shoot-outs and drug deals are common in the neighbourhood and where the occasional broken down car – tires stolen, windows shattered and seats torn up – stands at the roadside like a warning sign.
Instead of coming home with a hurting back and tired screen-eyes at the end of the day, I now come home with dirty hands and feet, after dealing with what others consider “trash”.

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Life on the sidewalks (November 2009, Myanmar)

Sidewalks serve the purpose of providing a safe and suitable space for foot passengers to walk alongside the road – such is their usual design. When British colonial urban planners designed Yangon’s sidewalks they most likely had the same thing in mind – a space for walking. Little did they know that this space between the now pothole-riddled streets and crumbling houses would turn out to become the city’s thumping heart, the centre of all its activity – from eating to car maintenance and from procurement to prostitution – it all happens on the sidewalks.
This is a story of Yangon – told from its sidewalks, in three small chapters.

Chapter 1: Rabbit podiums and spiky somethings
The most remarkable and immediately apparent feature of Yangon’s sidewalks is the army of tiny plastic stools that have quite literally occupied these roadside territories. They belong to tea- or snackshops and usually occur in groups of 3 or 4, huddled in a half-circle round a street vendor’s steaming pot of food or in a full circle round a table with tea cups and a thermos flask. And they really are tiny – imagine dressage podiums in a rabbit circus. It seems impossible in the whole of Yangon to find a normal, adult-sized plastic chair or stool. Everybody squats on these brightly coloured, baby size stools around equally small and low plastic tables, sipping the ever-flowing green tea or a cup of “3 in 1” coffee mix. A Yangon citizen, perplexed at my question why the stools are so small, said: “You’ve seen how little space there is on the sidewalks… we have to make the most of it!”
The majority of stools, particularly in large and busy streets, are part of small ground-floor culinary establishments, serving some of the incredible variety of street food available in this town. In the more residential and less central streets, the stools usually belong to one-man food stalls that take up a considerable amount of space along a sidewalk, considering that they are run and operated throughout the day as well as set up and transported to and fro on foot by one single person, complete with a little stove under a central heated pot, two counters holding various ingredients, side-dishes, sauces and dips, at least half a dozen of the famous mini-stools and sometimes even extra tables and a parasol or two, plus of course: bowls, spoons and chopsticks. How can all that be carried by one person? Well, this is probably another reason for the mini-chairs… but still! The secret lies in a long bamboo stick and a special way of walking. All the stools, tables, pots, chopsticks and all the food are stored in and on top of the two counters (often with mosquito nets protecting the food from insects), which are suspended from either end of the two-metre long bamboo stick. The stick is then balanced over this one person’s shoulder with parasols on top, looking a bit like human scales. Because the suspension-like flexibility of the bamboo stick causes the heavy counters to swing up and down during transport, carrying the stall along the street requires the person to walk at a very specific pace and without moving his body up or down too much, resulting in a fast, but soft and furtive kind-of walk.
One particular street, cutting east-west through downtown Yangon past Sule Pagoda, is so packed along its two sides with stalls, stools and vendors of all kinds – often just a blanket on the ground, piled up with fruit – that you can hardly see the dirty floor. There is no way one can walk along this and many other streets without stopping every few steps to observe, admire, smell, taste and discover something – at least your eyes are constantly jumping from one new, exotic type of food to another: fruits and vegetables that an average European has never seen in his or her life, or that bear some likeness to varieties known in the West, but are of completely different size or colour; some giant and spiky, some smelly and delicious, some small and sour. Add to that mountains of deep-fried and battered somethings that seem to enjoy great popularity, jars upon jars of pickled other-somethings, stacks of peeled and cut-up fruits, piles of whole-fried insects of almost any size or species and an incredible selection of on-the-spot cooked food, ranging from pots of steaming stock around which skewers with chunks of any imaginable type of meat, sausage or animal organ are piled, waiting to be cooked by baby-stool-seated customers, to the ubiquitous noodle-soup, often served with various kinds of delicious tofus and finally to a wide choice of the typically greasy Burmese curries with rice.

[...]
[...and this one will certainly have to be continued - chapter 2&3 are already drafted on paper...]


Copenhagen - تحكي عربي؟ (you speak Arabic?) (December 2009)

So now it's all over.
We're doomed.
Copenhagen was a failure, a disaster as some call it - the last chance for humanity wasted!!
...and from now on it's all downhill.
Brace yourself for the nearing end.

Take your family to a location high up
and learn how to grow your own food.
To be safe, buy two things:
canned food in bulk
and guns.

And then be ready... for the storms, the rains, the draughts and the looting.


Unlikely? I'm not so sure anymore. Though I am sure of one thing: whether Copenhagen succeeded or not or whether its successors will, isn't going to cut it for the planet. It's not going to be enough. Energy efficiency isn't enough.
Basically, what's being said to us people by those so-called decision makers (and wow how they took decisions!) is this: just continue to shop, while we try to make it all greener!
i.e. don't challenge the status quo, don't change your behaviour and most of all: don't stop consuming! We need growth, speed and profit!

Here's what some people did in Amman to plead for a solution to the problem:
http://www.aramram.com/episode/524
...but you'll have to speak Arabic to understand more than the images.

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